Love and First Sight Read online

  “It didn’t disappear, Will. It was there the whole time. It just looked different because it was rotated.”

  “Objects change shapes if you rotate them?”

  “Yes, it depends on the angle you are looking at them from.”

  “So how many angles are there?”

  “Three hundred sixty. You know that,” Mom says.

  “So to recognize a single object, I have to learn it from three hundred and sixty different positions?”

  “I don’t know… I never thought of it that way. I don’t think it’s that many. But I suppose you will have to learn the shapes of objects from different angles, yes.”

  “What about people?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do they change shapes from different angles?”

  “I guess so. You might see someone from the front. Or profile—like a side view. Or the back.”

  “I told you this would be difficult,” says Dad, unhelpfully.

  I sigh, closing my eyes and slouching in my chair. The idea that something can shift into different shapes depending on where you’re standing is a completely new concept to me. Until now, the world has been limited to what I could place my hands on. And what I could place my hands on I sensed from all sides at once. The object did not shape-shift if I rotated it. It still occupied the same discrete tactile points, the same shape of space in my hands.

  But vision, I now understand, is so much more complicated, full of so much more information. Not only will I have to memorize every shape, every object, I will have to memorize every object and every shape from every angle.

  It’s a task so overwhelming it makes me want to cry.

  Maybe, just maybe, I can learn a few basic shapes from enough angles that I can play Settlers tonight. I can play a board game with my friends like a normal sighted nerd would do on a Sunday night. So I press on, all morning and all afternoon, memorizing the shapes of the blocks, associating the touch sensation of each shape with a new kind of shape, a shape I can see.

  Fortunately, the colors come easier. I learn each standard and special-edition Skittles flavor, and by the end of the afternoon, I can identify those colors with close to 90 percent accuracy.

  Next stop: Settlers Sunday.

  CHAPTER 20

  The muscles around my eyelids get tired from closing them so often, which I do to give my eyes a rest and block out the dizziness. Back when I was blind—I say that like it was another era when really it’s been, what, three days?—I kept my eyes open all the time under my sunglasses. But now the light overwhelms me if I don’t give my eyes a periodic break by shutting them. Mom loans me her sleep mask to wear to Whitford’s. It covers my eyes, allowing me to open them without having to deal with their dizzying spatial resolution. Figuring people don’t usually wear sleep masks in public, I put on my sunglasses to cover the mask. So now I look exactly as I did before the operation. Just your average blind guy.

  My friends don’t know I’m coming over. I want it to be a surprise. We’ve been texting a lot over the past couple of days, but I asked them not to visit or anything. I didn’t want anyone seeing me until I was able to, you know, see them. I want to make a good first impression with the new me. I want to completely replace their old image of me as a disabled guy with that of an ordinary teenager who recognizes colors and shapes and plays board games with ease.

  I still use my cane to walk to Whitford’s house, though. His dad answers the door and shows me into the kitchen. There are gasps when I enter. I recognize one of them above the others: It’s Cecily.

  Cecily shrieks, “Will!”

  “Oh my God,” whispers Ion.

  “Did it work?” asks Nick. “Can you see?”

  I tell them about the last three days, the unexpected difficulties, my slow but steady progress.

  “Um, is that a sleep mask under your glasses?” asks Nick.

  “It’s showing?” I ask. “I thought maybe my sunglasses would cover it.”

  I explain how I’m wearing it because light and colors can be so overwhelming.

  “Wait, so you know colors now?” Nick asks.

  “Most of them.”

  “What color shirt am I wearing?”

  This is a test I think I can pass. I take off my glasses and the sleep mask. I blink a few times. The light is disorientatingly bright. I close my eyes.

  “Can we turn some of the lights off?”

  “Sure,” says Whitford, jumping up from his seat to flip a few switches. “How’s that?”

  I open my eyes. “Better.”

  I rotate in my chair to face Nick. “You’ll have to bring your body right up to my face. I won’t be able to pick out your shirt otherwise.”

  “Jeez, Will, I didn’t know we were at that stage in our relationship,” says Nick.

  Nick stands up and steps closer to me. A single color takes over my field of vision.

  “Red,” I say confidently.

  “HOLY CRAP!” exclaims Nick.

  They show me a few more colors, and I get them all correct. Their minds are blown. And mine feels pretty darn good about itself.

  “So,” I say. “How about a game of Settlers?”

  “Let’s do it!” says Whitford with a clap of his hands.

  “Should we set up the map?” I ask.

  Awkward silence.

  “Will, we already set up the map before you got here,” says Ion.

  “You can’t see it?” asks Nick, confused.

  “I… well… I can see colors, and I know some shapes, but it’s hard for me to identify objects,” I confess.

  “Can you see me?” asks Nick.

  I swallow. “No, I can’t really pick out people yet.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” says Ion. “Let’s roll to see who goes first. Will, do you want to do the honors? The die is right in front of you.”

  It’s thoughtful of her to tell me where the die is. But even so, the concept of “right in front of me” is vague at best. Furthermore, I know a die is small, and small equals hard to see. If I can’t pick out a person, how will I ever see a die on the table?

  I look around for it, but all I see is the usual waterfall of colors. I am able to identify them better now than I could yesterday—there’s blue, that’s green, here’s brown—but I can’t pick a small die out of the background.

  “Here,” says Nick, picking it up and placing it in my hand.

  I know he’s just trying to be nice, and I appreciate that. I mean, Nick’s not exactly known for his niceness. But at the same time, it feels like a regression. When I was blind, he never would have handed me a die after Ion had just told me it was right in front of me. Nick would have known that I could simply reach out and find it with my fingers.

  “Thanks,” I say, trying to sound grateful but probably not pulling it off.

  I roll the die and hear it tumble across the table. And as I do, I lose track of it. It disappears into the vortex of my confusing vision, one tiny white cube among millions of pixels.

  “Can you see it?” asks Nick cautiously.

  It pains me that I can’t, and that my friends are now realizing that I can’t.

  “Uh… well, I can see movement better than stillness. Can you wave your hand over it?”

  “Like this?”

  I see the blur of white that must be Nick’s hand.

  “Yes. Great.”

  I stand up and lean over the table, pressing my nose almost to its surface so the die becomes large.

  “Found it!” I say. It’s ridiculous, pretending this is a victory after Nick just showed me exactly where it was.

  “Can you…” Nick says. “Can you see the number?”

  The number of dots. Here’s something I should be able to do. After all, the dots on a die are kind of like braille. I’ve been reading dots all my life. Surely I can count dots on a die.

  Except that I can’t.

  It’s not that I can’t see them. I can see the white square of the d
ie, and I can see little black circles on it. But the dots wiggle and shift when I try to count them. One, two… but then I can’t figure out which dot I was looking at, and I lose count.

  This is absurd. Now I can’t count? Toddlers can count! I’m sixteen years old. How am I unable to count up to a number of dots between one and six on a stupid little piece of plastic?

  “I… I…” I stammer.

  They say nothing.

  “I have to go home.”

  I grope around the table with my hands, searching for my sunglasses and sleep mask. No reason to bother trying to find them with my eyes. That could take all night. Touch is much faster, much more natural. I find the objects and stuff them in my pocket, close my eyes, and flick out my cane, hurrying out the front door before anyone can argue.

  Cecily follows and calls after me.

  “Will, wait!”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I say. I don’t stop. If I stop, if I talk to her, if I try to look at her and just see that blurry image instead of her actual face, I know I will implode.

  • • •

  I missed Thursday and Friday because of my operation, but the next morning, Monday, I have to go back to school. It’s not exactly the triumphant return I had hoped for, in which I would shock my classmates with my miraculous ability to walk down the hall without a cane. No, it seems my fantasies were just that. Fantasies.

  I keep my eyes closed as I walk because seeing makes me too dizzy and confused to move. I turn left, take twenty-three steps, turn right, go up the stairs, turn the corner, ascend more stairs, and walk eighteen steps toward Mrs. Everbrook’s classroom. It’s the same route Mr. Johnston taught me on the first day of school. That day I remember being so excited about my future as a blind student at a mainstream school. Today I feel only disappointment. It’s the same school, the same route, and even essentially the same disability—I’m still legally blind, just like I used to be—but today, the walk feels completely different. Fortunately, no one at school besides the academic quiz team and Mrs. Everbrook knows I had the surgery. So they won’t give my apparent postoperative blindness a second thought.

  I’m sitting at my desk listening to Xander and Victoria read the announcements from the studio next door.

  “And finally today,” says Xander’s voice from the television behind Mrs. Everbrook’s desk, “we will announce the cohosts of your morning announcements show starting next semester.”

  His voice has all the confidence of someone whose victory is all but assured.

  In all the details leading up to my surgery and then missing school last week, I forgot the winners would be named today. Great. Just what I need. A crushing defeat. On the day when I’m already totally defeated.

  “And your cohosts are…”

  I listen to the sound of a sealed envelope being torn open. And then silence. I strain to hear, waiting for the names. Instead there’s the sound of a sheet of paper being crumpled up, and the sound of Xander’s footsteps as he leaves the studio.

  “Sorry about that,” says Victoria calmly. She smooths out the ball of paper. “Your cohosts next semester, chosen by schoolwide vote, will be… Will and Cecily. Congratulations to the new hosts.”

  I’m shocked. The whole school elected us, chose us, voted for us.

  After the announcements are finished, Mrs. Everbrook says, “Well, class, let’s give our new cohosts a round of applause!” and I hear the patter of clapping around the room.

  At the start of third period, journalism, I approach Cecily.

  “I’m sorry about last night. I’m still getting used to all this,” I say.

  “It’s fine. Take all the time you need.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I pause, then add, “So, hey, we won.”

  “How about that?” she says happily.

  I hold up my hand. A blur of movement suggests she’s moved out hers. I bring my arm down and, in a surprising miracle of accuracy, our palms connect.

  “High five,” I say. “Or was that a low five? I can’t really tell.”

  She giggles. “Wanna do something to celebrate?”

  “I thought we just did,” I say.

  “I mean, in addition to that midlevel five,” she says.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Today happens to be the last week of the van Gogh exhibit. Wanna go after school?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  At lunch, Nick, Ion, and Whitford pile all their bodies and arms around me in a tangled hug of celebration.

  “How does it feel to be a winner?” asks Ion.

  “Amazing,” I say, flashing a thumbs-up.

  • • •

  After school, Cecily takes me to the PU art museum. The security guard recognizes us.

  “Back for more, huh?” he says. “You can still touch the paintings. Just make sure no one sees you.”

  “Actually,” I say, “I had an operation. I can sort of see now.”

  He’s momentarily speechless. “You can see?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then why are you still wearing those glasses?”

  “I can’t see that great yet. Just sort of colors and shapes.”

  “Wow, I never heard of nothing like that.”

  “It’s pretty rare,” I say.

  “Well, I’ll be,” he says. “I think you’ll be the first blind person to ever see a van Gogh.”

  Cecily guides me to Les Alyscamps, the painting with the road in it that I touched last time, when she taught me about perspective.

  “Okay,” she says. “We are standing in front of it now. You can take the mask off.”

  I do. It’s so bright in here it stings my eyes.

  “What am I looking for?” I ask, trying to ignore the pain of the intense light. “How can I recognize the painting?”

  “Um, it has a road, some trees—”

  “Whoa, slow down. Let’s start with basic shapes.”

  “Okay. The painting is a rectangle on the wall about ten feet in front of us. Does that help?”

  “Yeah.”

  I search my field of vision for a rectangle. The colors shift and shimmer as I move my head.

  “Ah! I think I found it!”

  “Really?” she asks gleefully. “What do you see?”

  “It’s white, mostly. Almost entirely white. But there seem to be some colors in one part.”

  She sounds disappointed. “White?”

  “Why? Is that wrong?”

  “There’s no white in Les Alyscamps.”

  “Hmmm… I don’t know. I guess I’m getting my colors confused.”

  “Actually, maybe something else. Can you point at the edge of the painting for me?”

  “I can try.”

  I lift a hand into my field of vision and wave it. I see a flash of white. But it’s not the same as the white of the painting.

  “What color is my skin?” I wonder aloud.

  “Sometimes it’s just called ‘flesh.’ But if I had to describe it, I’d say like a tan or a very light pink.”

  “Tan,” I repeat, waving my hand.

  I bring it closer to my face and see it grow larger. I can’t decipher its construction; it’s not shaped like any of the toy blocks I memorized yesterday. It’s difficult to comprehend or describe. Apart from knowing, intellectually, that I’m holding my own hand in front of my face, I don’t think I could recognize it. But still, it is fascinating. My whole life I’ve relied on my hands to be my eyes, my connection to the world of space. And now I can actually see them, those fingers, those tactile probes.

  “Will?” says Cecily.

  “Huh?”

  “The painting?”

  “Oh, sorry, right.”

  I point my hand so it lines up with one edge of the rectangle of the painting. “Here’s one side.” And then up. “That’s the top.”

  “Okay, let me stop you right there,” she says.

  “What?”

  She touches me gently. “Will, that’s the wall
. You are pointing toward the edges of the wall.”

  I’m puzzled. “How can you tell which is the wall and which is the painting?”

  “The painting is much smaller. Here, let’s walk closer.”

  She leads me up to the painting. And indeed, as we draw nearer, the colors in the middle of the white rectangle—which it turns out are the painting in the center of the wall—become larger as we approach.

  “Now. Can you see the road in the painting?” she asks.

  I look very closely but all I see is a dance of colors. Orange, red, blue. But no road.

  “It’s a triangle,” she hints.

  “Sorry, I can’t find it.”

  “Are your hands clean?”

  “Yeah.”

  She lifts one of my hands and traces my fingertips across the paint.

  “These are the edges of the road.”

  I feel the shape, and as I do, it jumps out at my eyes.

  “Wow! I see it! The triangle! It’s a yellow triangle, right there, a yellow triangle!”

  I have no idea how a person could know this is a road, or how she would know by looking at it that this road is supposed to seem like it’s getting further away on the flat canvas of the painting. But I know there’s a triangle. I can see that much.

  She hugs me, the protruding lens of her camera squeezing against my chest.

  “Will! This is so exciting!”

  Though I can’t see the tears, I can hear that she starts to cry a little. “I can’t believe it worked! You can see!”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I can.”

  She gushes, “I’m so happy right now. You can see! It worked! AHH! This is crazy. Here, we need a picture. A selfie of this moment. Smile!”

  We stand in front of the painting, and she snaps a few photos.

  Later that day, I have a follow-up appointment with Dr. Bianchi. I put on goggles and press a button when I see dots of light, and I identify colors on flash cards for him. Upon seeing me successfully recognize a color for the first time, Dr. Bianchi makes several happy exclamations in Italian and throws his hairy arms around me.

  CHAPTER 21

  On Tuesday evening, I’m sitting at my desk reviewing my toy blocks. I can recognize each now, almost instantly and from many angles. But after naming a shape, I still reach out and touch it to confirm I am correct.